Thought Process for Designing My Business

The Thought Behind My Cinema.

I knew I wanted my cinema to represent freedom from reality and the wide variety of films available today. From this I began thinking about space and its potential/vastness. With no initial ideas for the design of my cinema I decided to google space. While looking at a wide variety of different pictures of space, the first thing I noticed was the colours. Most to the space images had different shades of blue, pink, purple and in some cases green. After choosing five different space pictures I picked out three of the most prominent colours from each picture. I filled a small circle with the different colours that I had picked out of each of the pictures and overlapped them slightly. This allowed me to see how the colours worked together and allowed me to gain an understanding about the sort of colours I could use for my business. (Business Mind Map)

After looking at the pictures of space I still didn’t have any idea what I was going to call my cinema so I began brainstorming words related to space. After noting down a variety of different words I began thinking about potential business names. After drawing a blank on my own I googles name generators and found a website named ‘Business Name Generator’. By entering a few key word, such as; Galaxy, orbit and infinity, the website then generated hundreds of potential business names. Most of them weren’t very suitable but some, such as; ‘Galaxy Access’ and ‘Cinema Cosmic’, would have worked for my business. However, none of the names I found sounded right. My last key word was constellation, but ‘Constellation Cinema’ didn’t sound right; so I began looking at constellation names. After looking at a bunch of different constellation names and meanings such as: Andromeda, Cassiopeia and Orion, I finally came across the Zodiac Constellations. Then the words ‘Zodiac Cinema’ came to mind. I decided I liked the name so began looking at the names and meanings of all the different zodiac constellations. (Star Sign research) While looking at the twelve different zodiac constellations and the dates that they occur I had a thought about my marketing campaign; so I made a quick note of my idea and decided to get back to it later. But for now I had my cinema name; Zodiac Cinema.

After deciding on my businesses name I went back to my colour board and added a picture of the zodiac constellations. From this picture I picked out a really dark navy blue/almost black colour, a light grey/white colour and a medium blue. But in simpler terms, I have chosen black, white and blue as my businesses colour theme. (Business Mind Map)

Now that I had my business name and colours, I move on to fonts. I looked at the different fonts available on both Microsoft Word and a website called Dafonts. To get a good feel for each of the fonts I made sure that I was applying the font to the words ‘Zodiac Cinema’. For me it was important that it was a block font which was quite thick, meaning I could remove the ‘fill’ leaving just the ‘outline’. The range of different fonts that I found on both Word and Dafonts met my specification precisely. Of the eighteen fonts I found that would work for my business I went with one from Word called ‘Agency FB’. After choosing my font I began looking at designing my logo. (Business Mind Map)

First I decided that I wanted to use the constellation picture within my logo. So I tried putting the constellation picture inside the text. However once I had removed the colour filling the text leaving just the outline. I then made the outline white and placed it over the top of the constellation picture. The after grouping the picture and copying it into ‘Paint’ I began removing the picture that was outside the text. This left me with Logo 1 on my business mind map. However, once the picture was inside the text it become unclear and just looked like black text with random white dots on it. So, by reversing slightly to before I removed the background for outside of the text. Therefore I ended up with a square logo with the constellation picture as the background and the white outline of the words ‘Zodiac Cinema’ in size 72. This can be seen in Logo 2 on my business mind map. However, with both words the same size didn’t look right, so I adjusted the size of the word ‘Cinema’ to size 48. This can be seen in Logo 3 on my business mind map. After making this change I was happy with my logo. (Business Mind Map)

For my marketing Campaign I thought I could use the different zodiac signs to encourage people to visit the cinema more. To do this discounted tickets can be offered to customers who provide evidence that their birthday falls within the current zodiac sign. For example: the dates for the Virgo star sign are the 23^rd of August to the 22^nd of September. So, anyone who visits my cinema and has a birthday within these dates would receive a discount on their cinema ticket.

As well using my marketing campaign I am also going to introduce loyalty cards to help encourage more people to visit the cinema. A customers loyalty card will be stamped every time they visit the cinema; and once the owner of the card has collected ten stamps they will get a free cinema ticket. However, I will need to add an expiry date of between three and six months because otherwise people who visit the cinema very little will eventually get a free ticket for just visiting the cinema as normal. Whereas the point of the loyalty card it to get people visiting the cinema more often.

Expiry Date Length	Number of visits per loyalty card	Number of weeks available to visit the cinema.
3 Months	10 Visits	12 weeks
4 Months	10 Visits	16 weeks
5 Months	10 Visits	20 weeks
6 Months	10 Visits	24 weeks

Of the possibilities listed above, an expiry date of either five or six months makes the most sense because, for example someone wouldn’t be able to visit the cinema every week because they wouldn’t want to watch every film available at the cinema and new films are released every two to four weeks. After conferring with my farther I agreed that a six-month validation date would be best. A loyalty card can only be signed and dated when the customer is paying for a full price ticket. This ensures that each time a full price ticket is purchased they are contributing a little towards their free tickets after they have been ten times. Mixing the loyalty cards and my marketing idea will result in a loss in revenue because customers aren’t paying full price on their tickets and are therefore not contributing fully towards their free ticket after visiting my cinema ten times.

First thing I need for my loyalty card design was a background. I wanted to use the same background I had for my logo but by enlarging this image it became distorted and unclear, therefore I had to look for a different background. After a little looking I found a picture of a starry sky that I liked which was the right size. I than copied the text from my logo to ensure that I got the right style and font. However the word ‘cinema’ didn’t look right underneath the word ‘Zodiac’ on the front of the loyalty card. So I moved the words next to each other. However because the words were different sizes it still didn’t look right so I made both word the same size, which made the front look better. Then I copied and pasted this text box in the same place and changed the text to ‘loyalty card’. By copying the original text constantly I am able to keep the same style and font easily. I then made the text smaller, inserted a white fill and removed the outline. I then arranged this text box underneath the title of my cinema. I decided less is more so moved on to the back of the loyalty card. I originally wanted a similar system as McDonalds with their hot drinks, but soon realised that this wouldn’t be effective for mu business. So, instead added a three-column table which had ten rows. In the first column I had the numbers one to ten. This indicates the number of tickets that a customer has to purchase in order to get a free ticket. The second and third column are empty but have room for a date, (second column) and a set of initials, (third column). Each trip to the cinema a member of staff will add the date and their initials to the card which signals one trip. I added the sentence ‘Visit our cinema 10 times and get 1 free ticket’ to the top and ‘Valid for 6 months from the first date’ at the bottom, and this was my finished loyalty card. (Design Ideas)

Gift cards are also a good way to encourage people to invite friends and family to the cinema. It is proven that people how receive a gift card are more likely to visit the shop or attraction than when they didn’t have a gift card to the shop. Therefore by using gift cards at my cinema I will hopefully attract more customers from the Great Yarmouth area.

For my gift card I decided to use the same design as my loyalty card. So, I copied the background and text keeping the name of my cinema the same but changing the name of the card from ‘loyalty card’ to ‘gift card’. I wanted to leave the front of the card as empty as possible but needed to add one more text box in the top right corner. This displayed the amount the card was worth. For my example design I used £20.00, but decided I would have £10.00, £30.00 and £50.00 gift cards as well. To help me understand what was needed on the back of my gift card I looked at example gift cards on google. After looking at a variety of different cards I found one that would work for the back on mine. Therefore I added a metal strip, bar code, some information about the card and the address of my business. However this all on the starry background didn’t look right so I changed it to a white background and black text. (Design Ideas)

After working with the starry background for my loyalty and gift cards, the background for my logo didn’t look right, so I decided to change the background from the constellation picture to the starry sky picture. Because I had changed my logo I then had to change my business colours because my old colours didn’t match my new logo. Using the same technique as before I picked out four instead of three colours. This included black, white, dark blue and medium purple, which became my new business colours. (Business Mind Map)

As I mentioned before I wanted my to use the different zodiac constellations as part of my marketing idea, and with no time to design all twelve marketing posters I designed just one in order to get an idea about what my marketing campaign would look like. I decided to do the Virgo poster. To start with I go my background. I used the same starry sky picture that I used for the background for my loyalty card, gift card and my logo. This picture works really well because no matter how small or large I make the image it doesn’t distort or become unclear. I then copied the style and font of my business name and changed the text to ‘Virgo’. In normal sentence case this didn’t look right so I decided to make the letters all in capitals. Then on a different word document I created my own zodiac constellation picture by using an image I found on the internet. To do this I just used the line and star shapes on word. First I put in the lines that join the stars together and then I used the star shape and added a start at each point the lines changed direction. Next I removed the shapes outlines and made them white. However white looked too bright so I made the stars a light grey/dark white and the lines a little darker to ensure that the stars stood out. I then grouped all the shapes to make one image and copied it to my design document. Once I had the constellation I placed it in the centre of my background. This left me with enough space underneath to add the Virgo dates and that there is a 25% discount available for those who have a Virgo star sign. I added this text in the same style and design as I used for the card names on my loyalty and gift cards. Once again I didn’t want to over crowd my poster so I decided I had everything it needed on it and therefore I wasn’t going to add anymore.  So I now had designs of my loyalty cards, gift cards and my marketing campaign poster. (Design Ideas)

After looking at a few different cinemas across the county I found that most charged between £5.99 and £11.99 for a ticket. So to work out my discount for people who had a birthday within the current star sign. To work out the correct discount I also had to think about my cinema ticket prices. So by using the following table I work out how much my tickets would be and the discount that would be given to customers in the current star sign.

Ticket price of:	Discount of:	Discounted ticket price of:	Yes or No. Why?
£5.99	10%	£5.39	No - Not enough difference between the normal ticket price and the discounted one.
£6.99	10%	£6.29	No – Not a big enough difference.
£7.99	10%	£7.19	No – Still not a big enough different so I increased the discount percentage to 15%.
£7.99	15%	£6.79	No - This gave a bigger gap but it still wasn’t big enough. So I increased the discount percentage again.
£7.99	20%	£6.39	No – Still only £1.60 of the original ticket price. Tried increasing the percentage again before changing the ticket price.
£7.99	25%	£5.99	Yes- By using a discount percentage of 25% the original ticket price went down by £2.00. which gave a discounted ticket of £5.99 which works quite nicely.

Now that I had my logo and marketing poster completed I began thinking about the signage I would use on the building I was looking to purchase. As seen on the (Signage) document the building has two appropriate places to put signs up. The first is centred above the door. It is a large area so my marketing posters will hang there. The second goes from one side of the building to the others and is directly above the door. This is where I wanted my logo. But after going back to my logo I realised that I had it as a square not a long rectangle. This meant I had to come up with a design that would work. To keep with my theme I kept with the starry sky picture as the background. I then had to add the name of my business. This is when I remembered what I did for the name on my loyalty and gift cards. So I copied the title text box from my gift card to in from of the starry sky background and enlarged the font size till it filled the background, this was size 80. I wanted to keep it simple so decided that was it for my signage.